Essay Assay, Part II

Make Your Essay Write Itself

I’m going to give you a spoiler and tell you up front one of the greatest joys of writing essays, which is sometimes your essay gets a bit too long and now you have two essays where you expected to only have one. You just lop off the part of the first essay where it started to be too long and put that in a new document and keep on going and it becomes a second essay. It’s like when you cut a leg off a starfish and the starfish grows its leg back and the leg you cut off grows into a whole new starfish. 

I realize the way I wrote the above makes it sound like I’ve spent a lot of time cutting the legs off starfish but I assure you I have never dissevered a starfish, nor any kind of fish. Or any other living thing. I am neither a psychopath nor a surgeon.

This essay is part of an essay that got longer than intended and it’s always such a great day when that happens, but then I didn’t write the second half right away so I have had to come back to it after a few days and wake my brain up to the topic again. Sometimes the Shelf Life does not write itself. For instance, I just walked away from my desk for ten minutes to do something else and when I came back there were no additional words to what there were when I got up.

Anyway, today is the second half of the essay on essays, in which we’ll go through how to map out and then fill in the center of your essay once you’ve chosen a topic and figured out your start and end point, as discussed in last week’s part I.

In school, you were probably taught the “five-paragraph essay,” which is exactly what it says on the tin, with the five paragraphs being these: 

• Introduction 

• First body paragraph

• Second body paragraph

• Third body paragraph

• Conclusion

In case you never learned this in school, or forgot, or if school was eleventy-million years ago for you as it was for me, I’ll briefly summarize. The introduction, as you might imagine, introduces the topic of your essay and your main thesis. So if your topic is on why chocolate is a superior flavor to butterscotch, you’d introduce the idea with a milquetoast phrase like “Human beings have enjoyed both chocolate and butterscotch flavors for centuries.” You conclude the paragraph by stating your thesis, that is, the position you will advance in the essay: “In this essay I will review the primary reasons why chocolate is superior to butterscotch.”

Your next three paragraphs will each discuss one idea that furthers your argument. Perhaps your arguments are these:

1. Butterscotch can only be sweet while chocolate can be made sweet or savory.

2. Chocolate provides health benefits that butterscotch does not.

3. Chocolate comes in white, milk, and dark varieties, while butterscotch is only ever itself.

Those will be your main ideas for each of your body paragraphs. You would write each of the three body paragraphs to state, and then support, one of the three arguments above. 

Your final paragraph, the conclusion, summarizes the points you have made in your body paragraph and restates your thesis, for instance: “In conclusion, because chocolate is more versatile in flavor profile than butterscotch, comes in many varieties, and provides health benefits, it is clearly the superior flavor.”

For what it’s worth, I have no dog in this fight. All flavors matter. I just picked the most inane example I could come up with in fewer than ten seconds and, as usual, I was thinking about food.

A grown-up, non-school essay should in general follow the same thread as the five-paragraph essay. It needn’t be exactly five paragraphs long, it doesn’t have to be as succinct and to-the-point, it can contain as many or as few arguments as you want, and you can include random paragraphs like the one above this that are completely unnecessary to your argument—but you generally want to start with a thesis (the argument you are making or information you are trying to impart), proceed with the arguments you will make in support of that thesis, and then wrap everything up in a conclusion.

Now: In the next two sections, I’m going to give you my foolproof method of generating an essay on any topic you have selected once you know where you’re starting and where you’re ending.

Outline Time

It’s outlining time! I dearly love making outlines, which you probably already know about me. (You can read about that in Outlining Like a Boss.) Outlines are like lists (which I love) but for writing (which I love). Even if you don’t outline when you are writing fiction (I don’t always), I definitely recommend it for essay writing because this is how you make the essay practically write itself.

I hasten to add: When you do this all the time, like if you write these multiple times per week, you won’t always have to make the outline on paper or in your document. Sometimes you may just kind of have it in your head. I often do. Usually when I begin a new Shelf Life I will start in the new document by writing a brief list of my main ideas halfway down the page to make sure I hit all of them, and then delete them as I write them into the text. It doesn’t always have to be a full-fledged formal outline.

Step one: The top level of your outline. The main thrust of each paragraph. For a five-paragraph essay on butterscotch versus chocolate it might look like this.

1. Introduction (choc better v butterscotch)

2. Health benefits

3. Flavor profiles

4. Multiple varieties

5. Conclusion

That much you probably already knew from above. Now: Under each main paragraph heading I am going to add a very brief reminder of the points I am going to make under each topic, like this.

2. Health benefits

   1. Flavonoids in choc

   2. Trace minerals (copper, iron, manganese)

   3. Sodium in butterscotch

   4. Vit B12

Then, I’ll go another level and add a very brief reminder of the things I am going to say about each of those topics.

2. Health benefits

   1. Flavonoids in choc

      1. Explain what are flavonoids

      2. Which contained in choc

      3. Dark v milk choc 

      4. No flavonoids in butterscotch

You can keep doing that for as many levels of depth as you want. As long as you can keep coming up with things to write about at each level, you can keep adding detail.

I think it’s always a good idea to do these things in threes at least. That is, you should try to have at least three details at each level. Two doesn’t feel like enough. People like things to come in threes. Your mileage may vary.

Anyway, jot down as many of these points as you can. You may find yourself with more than you need, at any particular level. When that happens, with this type of outline, it’s easy to see which ideas are least supported and which are most supported (have the most items underneath). You can also see at a glance what you intend to support each point with. If you need to take some out, remove the ones that have the least support or the ones for which you have the least compelling or interesting argument. 

Flesh It Out

Now: Important! Look at the outline you have created. Look all the way to the deepest level, whichever level that is. In the example above, I went down three levels (Arabic numerals, letters, Roman numerals) with the deepest level being Roman numerals. Count up the number of points you have at that deepest level. That gives you a ballpark of how many sentences your essay will have. 

The average length of a sentence in English is 15 to 20 words. Be honest with yourself, if you’re verbose or write complex sentences your average will be longer. Maybe analyze a sample if your writing to get your own personal average sentence length. Anyway, you can now approximate about how much content you have. Like, if my average sentence length is about 25 words and I have about 125 points in the lowest level of my outline then I’ll probably be somewhere around 3,000 words when I’m done. This isn’t an exact science. It’s just so you’ll know whether you’re way off target before you start writing text, so you can add or remove things at the outline level. 

Okay. The next step is this: Rewrite each of the points at the deepest level of your outline as a full sentence. So above I have a point in my outline that says “explain what are flavonoids.” To be honest I would probably take that idea another level down in the outline because I would want to define what they are but also explain why they’re good, what types of food they’re found in, et cetera. But let’s say for demonstration’s sake that’s my bottom-level point. I would rewrite it in sentence form, like this: 

Flavonoids are a compound found in many plant-based foods that regulate cellular activity and serve the body as antioxidants.

Next point reads “which contained in chocolate”:

Chocolate—that is, the mighty cocoa bean—is full of flavonoids, specifically flavan-3-ols, which are rich in nutrients and can help lower blood pressure.

This is the easiest thing in the world. You just go through the deepest level of your outline and turn each point into a sentence.

Once you’ve done that—transformed each point into a sentence—you have to go back through and make sure they flow smoothly. Does each sentence logically follow from the previous? Within a paragraph, do you introduce the main idea of each paragraph before going into your supporting sentences? If not, you usually just need to draft a sentence based on the point one level up. For instance, if I had this great paragraph on flavonoids that just came out of nowhere, I’d go up a level to “health benefits of chocolate” and draft an introductory sentence:

Chocolate offers a number of health benefits that butterscotch does not. 

Then I’d draft a sentence based on the next-level point, “flavonoids in choc”:

For instance, chocolate contains high levels of flavonoids.

I recommend working from the deepest level of your outline up to the shallowest level, because the deeper-level sentences are harder to write and more substantial, whereas the shallower-level sentences are more important for linking ideas and directing the flow of the essay. Save those for later so you can see the best way to connect your sentences together into a logically flowing essay.

Answer the Dramatic Question

Last but not least. The dramatic question is a part of all storytelling. It’s the cornerstone of any story, the crux of the central conflict. The why. It’s the question that your story will answer in the telling.

Not every essay tells a story. A narrative essay always will. Other essay types like expository, persuasive, and argumentative don’t have to and aren’t expected to tell a story, but they sometimes can. It’s fine if they don’t. But sometimes you’re writing an expository essay and there’s an opportunity for storytelling in there. Take the opportunity.

If you do that, if your essay—whatever type of essay it is—is telling a story alongside any other primary function it may have, make sure you answer the dramatic question by the end. Every reader enjoys a payoff at the end of reading. Sometimes the payoff is in the form of “I sought information on how to write an essay and I received that information.” Like today’s Shelf Life. It doesn’t really tell an interesting narrative story alongside teaching you my method for writing essays. And that’s fine. If you wanted to learn my technique and you got the info you needed to learn it, that’s your payoff.

Sometimes the payoff is greater, and the reader is left with an “oh wow” impression or at least a big smile, the type of smile you don’t usually get from learning about writing essays, for instance. Anyway, when you can do that, that’s great. As a writer you (we) should be trying to do that as much as you (we) can. I mostly have this experience when reading fiction or narrative nonfiction but expository, argumentative, and persuasive writing can do this as well. If you have an opportunity to ask a dramatic question in your essay writing, ask it. If you ask a dramatic question in your essay writing, answer it.

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